The specs for Mayor Zohran Mamdani\u2019s magical city-run grocery stores demand the moon, but shoppers will be lucky to find some overripe green cheese. <\/p>\n
As with most city contracting, the Economic Development Corp.\u2019s official Request For Proposals outlines an implausible wish-list that will deliver less than half what Mamdani promised<\/a> at more than twice the price.<\/p>\n The city wants potential operators of the stores to submit specific financial plans for stocking, staffing and operating five supermarkets \u2014 when the city hasn\u2019t built any of the five, nor chosen locations for three. <\/p>\n These imaginary stores must be managed under a business plan out of Alice in Wonderland: No deli counter allowed, but they must sell fruit, tuna, bean, chicken, egg and potato salads.<\/p>\n The operator should have a pre-existing \u201ccost-effective\u201d supply chain, but also source from \u201clocal suppliers and small businesses while keeping prices low.\u201d<\/p>\n Staff will have to enforce who can shop: only those with a \u201clibrary card-esque\u201d customer ID card (which is nothing like a voter ID because . . . well, because).<\/p>\n \t\t\tMore From\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPost Editorial Board<\/p>\n The stores are eligible for a taxpayer-funded \u201cAffordability Payment<\/a>,\u201d a subsidy to cover the cost of selling items for 30% below retail average, but management must have experience with employee profit-sharing.<\/p>\n Huh? If the store\u2019s finances are backstopped by the city, there\u2019s no \u201cprofit\u201d to share.<\/p>\n Unless of course you are a socialist playing \u201cstore\u201d with Monopoly money, which is what this experiment looks a lot like.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\tGet opinions and commentary from our columnists\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSubscribe to our daily Post Opinion newsletter!\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\tThanks for signing up!\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n And EDC officials on Wednesday were stumped <\/a>by tons of other questions about the RFP.<\/p>\n None of this gibberish is<\/a> news to anyone familiar with how the city burns cash on contractors every year.<\/p>\n During the migrant crisis, it handed out billions in no-bid contracts to insiders who wasted, lost or stole massive sums of money.<\/p>\n The leaders of contractors who run major homeless shelter networks<\/a> routinely pay themselves enormous salaries while also hiring companies they own as sub-contractors.<\/p>\n The Department of Education, which spends more than $13 billion on vendors every year, is notoriously opaque about its processes,<\/a> refusing to release details on hundreds of contracts. (No surprise that Kamar Samuels had signed off <\/a>on a series of odiferous payments before rising to become DOE chancellor.)<\/p>\n Mamdani\u2019s grocery store RFP takes city contracting to new heights of absurdity, but the way New York routinely does business is already insane.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The specs for Mayor Zohran Mamdani\u2019s magical city-run grocery stores demand the moon, but shoppers will be lucky…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":315765,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[1586,304,9,24,55,54,56,299,1211,81121,82],"class_list":["post-315764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-affordability","tag-editorial","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny","tag-opinion","tag-socialism","tag-subsidies","tag-zohran-mamdani"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315764\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/315765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}